Take Your Mark(sman)
by Mx Toucey
Summary: Post Radiant Dawn. An elaboration on Rolf's ending, with some romance and a happy ending! Rolf's new protogé piques his interest in more ways than one– is the interest mutual? (Title is a play on both "take your mark!" used when shooting and the colloquial phrase to take someone, so yes, there will probably be sex.)
1. Chapter 1

When fighting against brigands, it is always important to make sure you're not going to die. Skill, strength, and agility all play their part, but a good deal of battles are won based on luck– or rather, the strategist's interpretation, manipulation, and use of the odds.

Five against one are never good odds.

As the thugs neared the young man, they taunted him; after all, what could one skinny kid do? He didn't even have a close range weapon! The young man, for his part, didn't flinch. He simply ignored the barbs, reaching behind his shoulder, drawing an arrow, and nocking it. Within moments, it was over: he loosed his first arrow into a man's throat, then rapidly fired off four more shots. Every arrow hit exactly where he intended it to.

He didn't smile or congratulate himself on his accuracy or speed, or even on the arrow that went clean through the third man's throat, disappearing to only the Goddess knew where. He just scanned the area for more threats and, upon finding none, retrieved whatever arrows were still usable and went to meet the rest of his group.

No, five to one are never good odds.

Not when you're a bunch of lowlifes against the Greil Mercenaries' one and only Rolf.

"Alright, listen up," Rolf barked.

 _Goddess, I'm starting to sound more like Shinon every day. Am I really sure this is what I'm supposed to do with my life?_

He eyed the seven or eight youths in front of him. He wasn't that old himself– just barely legal age (although when did that stop him from having a good time with his companions?)– maybe a whole whopping two years older than some of his students. But they all looked at him the same way he used to look at Shinon: wide eyed, mouths slightly open, completely in awe of the sheer expertise they had the opportunity, no, the honour of seeing. All except one. The dark haired boy with impossible eyes– each one half green and half grey– was just staring at him with an implacable expression, blinking on occasion.

He looked utterly bored.

"When I say go, you're going to shoot at the target in front of you. You're going for speed here, but that doesn't mean that accuracy isn't important. After everyone is out of arrows, I'll go out and count the points. Missing the target is no points. Hitting your neighbour's target is negative points based on where you hit their target."

Everyone nodded solemnly, easing their bows into position. The half-eyed boy just stretched, his bored expression never fading.

"Get shooting."

Most of the students' hands were still reaching when the first– and second– arrows hit their target.

Before he could see which student had shot those first arrows, other bolts were flying through air and obscuring his vision. So, using common sense, he simply waited to see who was the first one finished. Unsurprisingly, it was the dark haired boy.

As the boy stood watching his peers, Rolf suddenly came to the realization that he really wasn't a boy. The student was probably only a few months younger than himself, and the only reason he was referring to him as a boy was because Rolf wanted to distance himself in age from these children– because Rolf himself was, in fact, still a child. Screw legal age or coming of age or puberty or how many people he'd killed. He was still young, still learning, and the only difference between him and many of his students was a few months and two wars.

 _Who the hell do I think I am, trying to teach kids my age?_

"Enough! Wait there and don't move. Make note of the coloured stripe on your bow, your arrows match that colour. I'm going to count the points and then you can see for yourselves how you did."

He could hear excited whispers as he counted each colour. Ultimately, the students were all pretty average. Everyone shot their own target for once, which was nice. Something was off though; the orange arrows yielded an average score, but...

"Alright, come get your bolts. Good shooting guys, I'll see you all in a few days."

He caught the bored student's eye though, and motioned for him to come over. The student raised an eyebrow, but sauntered over anyway, bow slung over his shoulder and hands in pockets.

"Yes?"

"For someone who looks so bored, you have a pretty average score- in fact, it was exactly average." The teen's face didn't move, although there was something in those dual coloured eyes– a spark of some kind– but it was gone before Rolf could place it. "I want to see you tomorrow, early, and see if we can't get a sense of what's going wrong."

The student nodded, passed the orange-striped bow off to his teacher, and left.

Tomorrow would be interesting; perhaps he could see what this boy was truly capable of. Because those missed shots were spaced precisely and evenly around the target to get an exact score of exactly half the total amount of points. There was no way that was an accident or coincidence.

A miss that close was precision with arrogance.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning Rolf woke up with mussed sheets, tangled hair, a hard-on and the lingering, ghostly sensation of someone else's lips on his. He shook his head, deciding that a cold shower would fix his physical problem faster than his hand, and pushed the remnants of last night's dream out of his mind. He didn't have any right to think of his student that way, and the distraction would be nothing but a hindrance to the lesson.

It wasn't as though he was trying to hide it– he'd known for a while that he liked other men, and after Oscar explained his relationship with Kieran he had stopped thinking of himself as a freak– but ultimately it would be weird for him to have a relationship with a student. It would be distracting, ill-timed, unethical and one sided. The young man lived in the village near the mercenaries' base, and Rolf had seen him on several occasions with women, laughing and flirting and giving them looks that could have convinced an angel to have a wild night.

When he got to the miniature waterfall nearby, he wasted no time stripping down and jumping into the water. It was waist deep and cold as hell. He ducked his head under the stream falling from above, shocking himself awake. The cold took care of his hard on immediately, and he started washing his hair and torso in the water. After getting used to the temperature, he found himself enjoying the time alone and letting his mind wander back to his dream...

"This is what you invited me over for?"

Rolf whipped around to see his student leaning against a tree, arms crossed and lips pulled into a distinct smirk. "If I'd known we were going to be skinny dipping, I'd have stayed home. That water looks freezing."

Lost for words, Rolf prayed that the water wasn't clear enough to see anything below his waist– not that anything was happening down there, but it would be embarrassing for him to have been exposed to a student. He quickly regained his composure, however, and simply shot back, "If you're not man enough for a little cold water, go wait over by the targets."

For a second Rolf thought he might have an impromptu bathing partner; after a moment-long staring contest, however, the young man walked off in the direction of the target field.

He quickly climbed out of the water, drying himself with the towel he'd brought and throwing on his change of clothes. He didn't bother trying to dry his hair; it was a hopeless case, too thick to do anything but wait for it to air dry. On his way to the field, it occurred to him that the only way for him to be caught out there was if he was being watched or someone from the mercenaries told the student where he was. Even if they had told him, they'd have certainly told him that he was bathing. So why would he show up like that?

The dark haired young man was waiting for him in the field, bow ready and quiver full. He had brought his own set today: sleek and light, fletched with what looked like falcon feathers, and the bow had enough length and tension to be a longbow from the look of it. He'd take a closer look later; right now, he wanted to see how the boy could shoot. For real this time.

"Well, you were here earlier than I thought. Since you're so eager to start, how about we get right to it?" Rolf nodded at the farthest target, a fair distance down the field. "Hit as many bullseyes as you can in the least amount of time."

Immediately, the youth brought his bow up and his hand reached back for an arrow. He sighted his target quickly, loosing his arrow. It missed the target, but the next one was almost a bullseye. And the next. And the next. His shooting was steady, quicker than most people but not nearly as fast as Rolf. The last three arrows were clustered right around the centre of the target, so close that from a distance Rolf couldn't see any space between them.

"Not bad."

He heard a curse and turned to see his student toeing the ground and death-gripping his bow. He looked up, meeting Rolf's gaze.

"I'm sorry."

"No, you're not. You shot that first arrow as a tester, to see how much the wind today is going to affect your shot. It's a bad habit that I'm hoping to beat out of you one way or another."

"That's not what I'm sorry for." The youth hung his head again, shifting his grip on the bow without loosening it. "I'm sorry about yesterday. I only shot the way I did because I thought it would get your attention. You only take one true student at a time, and I was hoping that pulling a stunt would interest you enough for a one-on-one meeting."

Rolf was surprised, but didn't let it show on his face. It was no secret that he didn't do group lessons for anything more than basics– it was the opposite of a secret, actually– but for someone to want his tutelage so badly that they would risk being discarded for not having enough raw talent to benefit was new. If he wasn't as nit-picky as he was (due to many years of Shinon's particularly nasty brand of precision training) he might have missed the deliberate placement of the shots. It was risky, especially with the attitude and air he'd given off.

"Well it worked. Here you are. Do us both a favour: when you go into town today, put up a couple of posters I'm about to give you. That way nobody shows up for the next session."

The youth bowed his head; a small twitch in his jaw let Rolf know that he was gritting his teeth.

"What's your name?"

"Oliver."

"Oliver…"

"Yeah," the youth– Oliver– snapped, "What do you care?"

Rolf bit the inside of his cheek. Being taught by Shinon wasn't so bad, but teaching someone with that temper? It was suicide. There was a reason Shinon was mostly self-taught, and it actually had little to do with his running away from home and not having any money.

"Because I meant what I said about beating that habit out of you, and if I'm going to be spending any time on you, I need your name and for the rest of the candidates not to show up in the middle of a private lesson." The look on Oliver's face when he met Rolf's gaze was hope bordering on hurt, as if he was almost certain this was a joke. Rolf just smiled– not a smirk, his smiles never quirked like that– and went inside the fort to grab some notices for the lesson cancellation. "I want you to come here every other day, but not quite as early as you were today, for your instruction. Does that sound fair to you?"

Immediately, Oliver was beside his teacher, keeping stride and biting the inside of his cheek to from grinning, but his grey-and-green eyes were already doing the job his mouth should have… the mouth that had been so heavenly in Rolf's dream last night.

If nothing else, teaching him would be interesting.


	3. Chapter 3

The next lesson started less awkwardly than the first, if only slightly. Apparently, Rolf wasn't quite living up to expectations when it came to the actual training exercises, since the first words out of Oliver's mouth were:

"You want me to do what now?"

Shinon would have sighed and shook his head, if he'd had a hangover; if he was drunk, he'd've given him a good smack; if he was sober (a rare thing when he was teaching Rolf) there would have been yelling, a light shove, cursing, and insults.

Rolf was not Shinon.

"Shoot the arrows into the buckets," he smiled. "Two in each bucket. Missing means running two laps around the fort."

Oliver gave him an incredulous look: you expect me to do what now? How is this supposed to improve my archery? He understood that feeling all too well. He'd never had the guts to actually give Shinon that look himself, but he thought the same thing often.

In truth the exercise was kind. The buckets were relatively large targets, and they weren't a ridiculous distance away. The only hard thing about the exercise was the wind today, which honestly wasn't that bad. It would only help Oliver break his habit of shooting a test arrow to see how the rest would fly.

"We're starting here and working our way up to harder stuff. You need to learn to be accurate in wind– if you try shooting a test arrow in a fight, you lose valuable time and get yourself killed. Or, worse, it could accidentally shoot someone on your side. Are you going to shoot or not?"

Oliver raised an eyebrow, eyes flashing dangerously as he stared at his teacher. Those eyes were unnerving, like being stared at by an entire crowd out of one face; the green was mesmerizing, and the stormy grey was opposingly calm. The staring match went on for a few moments until Oliver broke it. His eyes flicked lower on Rolf's face, and then he could have sworn they went even lower, giving him a quick once over. He could feel the heat rising on his cheeks when those strange eyes met his again. He coughed, looking away to the buckets and doing his best to ignore his student's gaze.

"The wind's only getting worse– there's a storm coming. Shoot now or later, I don't care, but I'll make you run those laps in the rain if I have to."

Oliver raised an eyebrow, but nocked his arrow anyway. The wind picked up as the two stood there; Rolf continued focussing on the buckets, confident that the blush was gone but less so that it wouldn't return.

* * *

In then end, Oliver ran six laps. When Rolf sent Oliver home, he could have sworn the boy looked hesitant to leave; however, after he was given a wave and a promise to return the day after next, he simply put it down to confusing what he wanted to happen with what actually did. Not that it stopped him from walking into a door thinking about it. Or Oscar asking him if he was okay: "You seem a little zoned out."

Or Boyd from laughing his ass off when he walked into the door.


End file.
